Will Brehm  2:44
Jason Beech, welcome to FreshEd.

Jason Beech  2:46
Thanks, Will. It’s really nice to be here and be able to talk to you and to everybody who’s listening.

Will Brehm  2:51
You’ve done a lot of work on educational transfer which is a pretty big topic in the field of comparative education. Can you just give us a quick overview of what this term means and how it’s been used in the field?

Jason Beech  3:05
Yes. Well, educational transfer refers to the notion of certain ideas, institutions or educational practices that are moved from one place to another. So, for example, the US is creating its own educational system in different states and someone like Horace Mann travels to Europe and he sees what he thinks works there and decides to take it over. Such as, for example, the normal school or when the Japanese copied some version of the Humboldt University. That’s what usually is referred to as educational transfer. Also, policy borrowing, the idea of something that’s moved from one place to another. And this, of course, has a long history in the field of comparative education. The idea of learning from others has been always a big driver in research and in practice-oriented research in comparative education since the origins of the field, and up to now.

Will Brehm  4:16
And it often has to do with this idea of best practices as if some other country or system is doing it better than the home country. So, therefore, you borrow the ideas from someone else.

Jason Beech  4:29
Yeah. Overall, it usually starts with the identification of a local or an internal problem. So, if I have a problem, I need to train teachers to create the nation, or I’ve got a problem with kids carrying guns into schools, or whatever the problem is, I then try to find out instead of inventing a new solution, what usually is done is trying to find out who’s done it before? And how can I save time and energy by identifying these best practices or good practices? So, it’s very much based on the assumption that good practices can be identified, adapted, and then moved into a new context. Of course, I’m giving you a very simplified version of it, then I guess that in the conversation, we can make it a little bit more complex, because of course, what happens is that throughout history, there has been different ways in which these ideas have been moved, which kinds of ideas move, who are the actors and, of course, the way in which this is interpreted.

Will Brehm  5:46
Right. And so, what are some of the common assumptions that this sort of static notion of educational transfer makes?

Jason Beech  5:58
Well, I mean, the problem, of course, is that this notion of transfer is very much based on what one could call methodological nationalism, or the idea that institutions or practices exist pure in one country, in one place. First of all, it’s based on, kind of, the nation state as unit of analysis. Usually, when you read articles that are based on this notion of transfer, they are based on the idea that Argentina transferred the normal school from France, or, as I was saying before, the US at some point transferred a certain kind of primary schools from Britain. And it’s this idea that something exists in one country and then is moved into another country, and then maybe it changes because of the context. So, I think that that is kind of problematic especially, it might still be useful for certain cases. But overall, in the current conditions of the global architecture of power, regarding education, things are a bit more complicated because ideas and institutions don’t just exist purely in one place, and then move to another. Actually, even in history, educational systems have always been constructed through the diffusion of ideas. So, to what extent is, say whatever, the Australian educational system purely Australian? I don’t know if you’re aware of this notion of “the grammar of schooling”. Now, this idea of schools have a very similar grammar in most parts of the world. The way in which it’s divided in spaces, divided into rooms, the ways in which students are divided into grades, depending on their age, the ways in which rooms are organized, and all of that. It wasn’t just created in one place, and then it moved. The whole notion of the school was created as the idea of the school moved from one place to another. So, what I’ve been trying to do in my work is to concentrate more on not on a static notion of transfer as if one idea exists in one place, and then is moved to another, but rather, on the idea that ideas and institutions are created in the process of moving. And the way in which they move, the channels through which they move, affect the shape that this idea, institution, practice is going to take.

Will Brehm  8:29
And the concept of globalization, which has become very popular and maybe overused today, oftentimes is meant to overcome this issue of static borders, which is kind of embodied by this notion of the nation state. But you say that globalization has lost some of its edge as a methodological tool. How so?

Jason Beech  8:58
Well, I think that the concept of globalization has become a very comfortable way of avoiding complexity. And so, you find a lot of talk about globalization. So, globalization is often referred to as a cause, for example, for a certain educational reform. But the question, of course, is, so what do you mean by globalization? So, globalization has become this word that means everything and at the same time means nothing. And of course, this is not the case for everybody who uses the concept, but in general, it has lost much of its edge. It’s become a word that is being used without much critical analysis. And basically, one of the big problems with this is that it kind of takes the field of comparative education and education policy into this kind of binary notion of the construction of the global as something abstract. Something completely that is out of control. So, this idea that there’s something out there -globalization- that we don’t control. And it imposes ideas on us. No, it’s this notion of, kind of, a narrative of domination and resistance. The global dominates and imposes on the local certain views, for example, about what many people call neoliberal views about education. It’s imposed from the global into the local, and the local either adapts and changes its system to adapt to its global discourse, or it can resist. It can be some kind of a heroic resistor. But I think this binary between the global and the local needs to be broken up. First, because there’s no such thing. I mean, the global is also composed by what we call the local. So, whatever. We can see the OECD or the World Bank as the global but the people who are working there, they come from certain places. When the World Bank imposes certain policies on a country there is local people that are involved in buying those ideas and putting them into practices and acting them. And so, it’s never purely global, purely local. It’s much more complex than that. And at the end of the day, what I see is that these kinds of concepts, either they’re useful for us to further understand the kind of social issues that we’re trying to understand or they’re not. And what’s happening with globalization in many cases is that it’s not really helping us to open up the kind of social issues that we’re trying to understand but rather, it’s a way of closing the black box and not looking inside.

Will Brehm  11:46
How would the use of relational space, which is something that you use and Marianne Larsen, who was on this show, in an earlier show uses, how would that concept help understand the social issues?

Jason Beech  12:05
Well, let me -just in case people are not aware- explain very briefly, what do we mean by relational notions of space? It’s seeing space not only in its concrete form, for example, as a territory, as a place, but also, as a set of relations. So, say you and I are now creating a space. We are both in two very different places but we are connecting, we are talking, and somebody is going to listen to this, hopefully and they’re going to participate of this space in a certain way. So, what relational notions of space are based on the idea that space is not something that is out there already, like a container of social processes but it’s also created by social relations. So, when we are relating, we are creating a new space. And of course, the notion of network becomes very, very important both as a way of relating as an empirical reality but also as a methodological tool to understand social relations. And when you start looking at those relations in that way, it is a way in which you can start breaking up, for example, the binary between the global and the local, the macro and the micro, because what you see is that there are social relations that cannot be necessarily classified in those ways. It’s not global, it’s not local. It’s somewhere in between, or it’s both at the same time.

Will Brehm  13:39
And sometimes it’s not even productive to think of them in those terms at all, but rather, really unpack the relations that occur between actual actors.

Jason Beech  13:48
Exactly. And of course, depending on what you’re trying to find out, it might be important to know if those actors are located in Washington, in Paris, or in Buenos Aires or Cambodia but it might not be important. It depends very much on what you’re trying to do. So, these are very flexible, methodological and theoretical tools that you have to adapt to whatever you’re trying to understand. And what I found useful about using relational notions of space is that you start to see relations and power relations that you wouldn’t have seen so easily if you used kind of territorial notions of space.

Will Brehm  14:35
Could you give an example?

Jason Beech  14:37
Let me give you an example of some research I’ve been doing. It might be a little bit long, but I’ll give you an example of some research I’ve been doing. So, for example, I’ve been researching about a project that’s been going on in Argentina for the last four years, more or less, that’s called Conectar Igualdad like “connecting equality”, and it implies quite a lot of things, but basically giving one computer to every young person in secondary schools in Argentina, and of course teachers, and connectivity and teacher training. So, for example, if you would look at this program -so, this program started in 2010 in Argentina. It was launched by the president at that time, Cristina Kirchner, and it was deployed already -last time I looked- 3,800,000 computers had been given out. It’s a huge program. And if you look at it from, what we were calling before, a static perspective on transfer, you could start by saying, Well, okay, it was Nicholas Negroponte in, I think, 2007 that started with the One Laptop per Child. He presented in the Davos Forum, the One Laptop per Child. And when that started, the whole idea of having one computer per child started, then many countries in Latin America started adopting these kind of programs and technology, especially Uruguay which is neighbor to Argentina created a big program called Plan Ceibal. They gave one computer to every child in primary education. That created a lot of pressure to Argentina to create their own program because, of course, the press was saying they are doing it, why don’t we do it? At one point, Argentina launched it. So, you could see how -so, then the president launches it at the national level, and then it trickles down, it goes into the provinces, and from the provinces into the schools.

So, you could see how this idea comes from MIT, it comes from the global world, and it goes slowly into the regional, and then into the national, and from the national to the provincial, from the provincial to the local, and to the schools. Now the problem of course, is a straight line or linear way of looking at it and you could actually, for example, in the work I was doing, maybe 10 years ago, I would have looked at it that way. And I would have tried to understand how it was transformed. So, how was the original idea of Negroponte transformed in Uruguay, how it was then transformed in Argentina, as if it had gone in a direct line from one place to another and it transforms once. So, this idea of context. You know, when it changes context, it transforms. Now, the problem with that is that the borders between the global, the regional, the national, the provincial, the local, they’re not really there. They’re not such strong borders. So, if you look at it in another way, you can see. So, for example, we -with my colleague, Alejandro Artopoulos, we studied this program, and we decided to use actor network theory to look into it. So, basically, just two things about actor network theory. What we tried to do was -the way actor network theory works is it doesn’t try to crystallize practice, but it rather looks at practice as the social, as being permanently changing, as dynamic. It’s permanently changing. There’s a permanent process of innovation. And the other two things that are important is what they call the concept of symmetry. So, human beings and non-human beings are considered in the same way. So, when you’re recreating space, a computer or a pencil, or a textbook has agency and they exert power. Okay, so that sounds really strange, but I’ll give you an example now. And the other thing, the methodological tool that actor network theory uses is what they called an assemblage, which is basically a network of human and non-humans that comes together to perform certain functions. So, let me explain how you would look at Conectar Igualdad from that point of view. You could start, for example, with a very, very localized, simple issue that we saw. When we went to look at classrooms with a kind of ethnographic approach, we went to look at classrooms where allegedly, that we were told that there were good practices in how these computers were being used. What we found over and over and over again, was that these classes started 10, 15, and 20 minutes late. It was a long time taken to set up the computers okay? So, if you look at that, that’s a very localized problem. So, immediately, you could say, well, the teachers are not very well prepared. You know, the school doesn’t have good infrastructure. But it’s a little bit more complex than that. Because, for example, some of the reasons -so, you start recreating a network of who is involved in these delays. You can start seeing how there’s very, very different actors that participate.

Okay. So, let’s start by one actor. The national state comes and brings the computers in, okay. So, those computers are brought in by the national state. The national state created this whole issue because the computers wouldn’t have been there if they wouldn’t have done that. Now, the national state also provided classes with these kinds of routers or some other kind of what you have in your house to create a network and use Wi Fi so that the computers could all be networked within themselves, okay. And the logic was that they were going to connect schools with connectivity so that kids could go and watch YouTube videos and other educational software, etc. Now, the problem is that Argentina is a huge country. It’s very, very big. It’s got very, very difficult territories. So, basically, that was a big failure. Only like 17% of schools were connected. And even when they were connected, when you have, say, 500 or 1,000 kids using your computers, watching YouTube videos, you need a very, very big connectivity. So, most schools didn’t have it. So, what they did was found a new strategy, and they brought in servers into schools. And those servers could have the materials that the kids needed in there. Now, for the kids to access those servers, then the teacher had to connect every computer to the internal network of the school. On the other hand, the computers came with a software that was called e-learning class. This e-learning class was provided by a Chinese company, and this e-learning class with the routers or this technology that created a network wouldn’t work well. So, the teacher spent 10-15 minutes trying to connect every single computer to the network. On the other hand, teacher training had emphasized a lot of this e-learning class because it was a way for teachers -and teachers loved it- because it was a way for teachers to keep control. With that program they could see what each kid was watching in his or her screen. So, they could avoid, of course, misbehaving and things that you can imagine.

Will Brehm  22:13
So, it sounds like the computer is a non-human actor that has power over time, but also over other human actors -the students?

Jason Beech  22:25
Well, it’s a whole assemblage. It’s a whole assemblage of the students and their attitude. So, most teachers wouldn’t. So, now, let me tell you what happens. The students would arrive to school, and they didn’t have the computers many times because most teachers wouldn’t use them. If they have them, they didn’t have a full battery because they didn’t have this discipline of every night connecting the computers to plugging them in. So, the teacher had to send the kids that didn’t have a computer to the head’s office to find replacement computers. The kids that didn’t have a full battery had to connect the battery to the plugs, but there weren’t enough plugs. Or if the plugs were there, for example, a kid would come by and kick the cable when he was going to the toilet and disconnect the computer of six or seven kids that would lose their work. So, what I’m trying to show is how all of these material objects -yes, the plugs, the batteries, the computers, the server, the router- became very important actors in defining the times of the classroom. The classes started 15 to 20 minutes late because all of these new assemblage with all of these new things, but also with people that had to behave in different ways was not working as it was expected. It was working in very different ways. So, the teachers’ students had to adapt to this. And of course, also the subjects had to perform functions that were different to what it was thought originally in the design of the plan.

So, I don’t know if I’m being clear here -and when you start looking at this as an assemblage of people and objects, what you start seeing is that there is a lot of objects and people that are having an effect on the classroom and what it means to teach and learn in Argentina. So, for example, these computers would all come with Microsoft Office, okay. Now, Argentina has a declaration in its law of education that private companies will never participate in public education, okay. Now, if you want to give 3.8 million computers out to the kids, the only way you can do that is if you buy them from the private sector. So, companies like Intel, companies like this Chinese company that make that software called e-learning class, companies like Microsoft are having an influence on what it means to teach and to learn in Argentina, on the timing of the classrooms. And I’m not saying this is necessarily something bad but if we would have looked at it in a traditional way, we wouldn’t have seen this interaction between how all of these Chinese, Californian, global, if you want, actors are having a strong influence on what it means to teach and learn in Argentina. And we would see this problem as a localized problem. We would say, “Oh, this is a problem of teacher training and teachers. Teachers don’t know, or are not adapted to the knowledge society, and they don’t know what they are doing”.

Will Brehm  25:41
So, seeing educational transfer with using the concept of relational space, and using the approach of actor network theory, basically raises new questions that would be completely unseen using the more static conception that sees the global, the regional, the national, the sub-national in some linear fashion.

Jason Beech  26:04
Yeah. Actually, what I think is that the whole notion and idea of transfer is not very useful. No, it’s like, even the notion of policy borrowing. Policy borrowing tends to focus on written policy texts. And, of course, policy texts can be important. But what I’m trying to say is that we need to look at the world in a very different way, what Ulrich Beck calls a cosmopolitan sociology, knowing where the local, the global, the universal, the particulars -we should overcome these binaries. We have to look at it in a much more complex way in which there are new spaces of educational policy. So, global forces do not only come through the state. I mean, they come in very different ways. In ways that are somehow related to the states and ways in which they don’t even touch the state. So, if you only look at the policy texts and the way they are written, for example, in Argentina, we will assume that there is a strong resistance to market forces. And there is at the level of rhetoric and probably in the intention of policymakers, which is a genuine -well, depending on what you think about good or bad intention- but it’s a genuine intention of resisting neoliberal or market forces. But these forces, what they do is they come in through other ways. They bypass the state, and they come in. So, if we only look -I mean, that’s the question. When we are looking at education policy, when we are looking at educational transfer -if you want to still use that word- what we need to look at is how power moves throughout the world, the way in which we define what is a good education and how it should be practiced, is defined in different parts of the world. And if we want to really see that, we cannot only concentrate on policy texts, we need to look at it in a much more complex way. And one way of doing it is using relational notions of space and reconstructing the networks of the classroom, for example, in this case. I mean, you could reconstruct the networks of the Ministry of Education but seeing who and what is having an influence on the way in which a certain educational policy or an educational practice is being enacted. And basically, you see things that you wouldn’t see from a very traditional perspective.

Will Brehm  28:27
So, do you think using the language of education transfer and policy borrowing, do you think they’re dead terms that we should simply move on from?

Jason Beech  28:39
Well, I mean, it might be too strong a claim and if there’s people that are comfortable using them, it’s fine. I don’t want to impose anything on anybody. But at least for me, they don’t help me think anymore. They helped me for a while. And I think now -so, I see concept -I’m not dogmatic with concepts. I don’t think that things need to be not used. Like, for example, I criticized the concept of globalization. But when I read, for example, the work of people like Fazal Rizvi or Bob Lingard, and they use the word globalization, they use it in a complex way. And I like the way they use it. So, it’s not necessarily that you have to discard the concept but rather that you have to really think, well, what are you looking at? And is it really the best concept that you can use to open up? No, I think of concepts as knives that can help you dissect and open up a social process that you’re trying to understand. And so that’s a question I asked myself. Is this the best way or is it by using the concept of transfer I’m kind of using it to black box a lot of more complex issues? Personally, I think I’m more into this kind of move into cosmopolitan sociology, rethinking space in terms of how there are new spaces of education policy. New spaces in which education policy is being constructed. And it’s mostly through networks, as you can see that thinking of time in a different way. Not thinking that education is a static process. It’s something that is in equilibrium and then something comes from outside that produces some kind of change or discomfort and then the practice finds a new equilibrium. I think we’re changing permanently. And then of course, this implies a huge methodological challenge. That is, what is an empirical data? How and where do we find it? And of course, the big issue of how do we represent it? Because these networks are very difficult to represent. If you want to represent change, we use that to take pictures. And when we write a text, we are writing a picture, photograph of a movie, you know? We’re taking photographs of a movie and how could we represent the movie? The things that are permanently changing. That’s a big challenge we have.

Will Brehm  30:56
You said that 10 years ago, you would probably have been writing articles and papers based on this more static conception of educational transfer. And now you are fully embracing the dynamic complexity, cosmopolitanism of these processes: why or how did you change your thinking?

Jason Beech  31:20
Well, I mean, it’s not that I would have. I did it. I mean, if I read my PhD thesis and many articles, that’s the way I was thinking. I don’t know. As I said, I’m not dogmatic. I think that theories -I’m permanently reading new stuff. Thinking in new ways, I, just as you know, I’ve been in in Melbourne working for a year with Fazal Rizvi that opened for me a whole new range of -and of course, other colleagues there in the Graduate School of Education in Melbourne- it opened up a whole new lines of thinking, new ideas, I go to seminars, I go to conference, I listen to people, and I try to incorporate all of that. And I think that the attitude that I have, and many people have in our field and in other social sciences is of being quite humble in terms of our capacity to understand the social world, which is very complex. So, thinking that we already have the tool, as some theories become quite crystallized and what people do is kind of retry that theory in new contexts. And what they find is that this new empirical work they did, the only thing that does is confirm the theory that they already have. Well, that’s boring. I don’t see that as productive. I see that as being kind of, I don’t know, not really productive. Not really helping us see new things. And of course, it’s taking risks. And when you’re starting to use these other ways of looking at the world, you might see new things and you might lose others that you used to see before. So, you always have to be critical of the way in which you’re analyzing the world. The kind of concepts you’re using and be open to new ideas. That’s the way. For example, the work I did with Marianne Larsen on relational notions of space, which is kind of theoretical, opened for me the possibility of rethinking a lot of the empirical work I was doing in parallel, maybe from another perspective.

Will Brehm  33:24
Well, Jason Beech, it’s always inspiring to talk to you. And thank you very much for joining FreshEd.

Jason Beech  33:31
Thank you, Will, and I hope someone listens to this and it’s useful for other people to think in new and different ways. And, of course, I’m open to the critiques of people who listen to this.

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